The new Centrafuse Market - What does it mean for you?
Centrafuse End-Users
Most of you have noticed we've recently (with 3.5) added a built-in "app store" into Centrafuse officially dubbed
Centrafuse Market. This gave us all a nice and easy way to get your favorite apps and then keep them updated. It's easy for users and also for developers - allowing them to easily push out app updates. With the 4.0 release we have introduced the ability to buy (and sell) premium apps.
Why should I pay for apps, you may ask. Its a fair question, as you already paid for Centrafuse and several community developers make apps (formerly known as plugins) for free already. Our thinking behind this is - by allowing developers to set prices for their apps, they can get paid for their work, which is important. This becomes very important when it comes to supporting existing users of an app. You see, developers usually start on a new app project for one reason - they want it themselves. And they share it with the community to for a few reasons: help testing, validation, feedback and for some glory. And because most developers are quite tenacious when it comes to solving a problem they often will complete the app. They key word is
complete. As we all know, that one app we use - our favorite one, would be just PERFECT, if the developer would just add support for
insert your desired feature here. But they mostly finish it to where they want it and that's the end of it. That's why you see some cool apps pop up, then fizzle and fade away. The developer loses interest. Sure, donations help, but its not the same as a true marketplace where paying customers have an obligated developer who is dedicating time to fixing bugs and listening to customer feedback. And as the app gains stability and features, the more popular it becomes and everyone wins.
This is what we are creating - a viable marketplace for in-vehicle app developers to get their work out there and get paid for it. You, the end-users get access to a higher class of apps - premium apps with more frequent updates with developers that are happy to get feedback and improve it. This is a small and rapidly growing community and with your help we can make it a success.
You should expect to start seeing these new breed of premium apps begin to appear in the Market in the next couple of weeks. Developers are already working on some more "full featured" versions of some of the apps you already know. Stay tuned to the
Centrafuse Market home page for the latest app releases.
If you have an idea for a new app or skin, check out the brand new section of the forums -
Centrafuse Market on Forums
For a discussion on the new Centrafuse Market see this
general discussion thread.
Also, we'll be adding new items to the
Knowledge Base for Market, just use the "Market" filter on the right to select this category in the
KB. Check back often as we'll be updating it regularly.
Centrafuse Developers
If you read the above section, you can see what we're going for here. We want to make it worth your time to build Centrafuse apps. With Centrafuse Market we are giving you, the developer, the power to set your own price and minimize time dealing with setting up payment and licensing infrastructure to support a paid app. With the Market, you can simply upload your app to Market; when a price is set the app becomes protected from sharing, meaning it can only be installed for the Market user that downloaded it. Your royalty payments are tallied up at the end of the month and you receive your payment via PayPal. At any time you can log in to view your Developer Dashboard to view sales and download stats, your current orders or how much you've made. This allows you to spend more time working on cool new features instead of worrying with the tedious payment and licensing details. Focus on improving your app's offering (or building new apps) and you gain popularity and more happy paying customers.
The Centrafuse "paid" Market is now technically live, although we're still working with some of our community developers to get the first round of premium apps up on the Market for sale. For the rest of you, now is the time to start working on your first premium app. If you haven't yet signed up to be a developer, you can do so from your Account page, or by
following this link. Once you sign up you'll have access to download the latest 4.0 SDK from your account page. There is a special section in the CHM help file for implementing support for a paid app. All you do is set a special flag, then submit to the Market along with a price.
Centrafuse 4.0 SDK and Paid App Support
If you're a developer and want to read more about how the new protected app licensing mode works, check out
this thread.
New Forum section for Market app/skin development and feedback
We've created a new section on the forums specifically for app and skin development. Please be sure to read the Description along with the Rules/Guidelines for each section, so you will know how and where to post. With this new forum section, we are trying to impose some order so that it doesn't get so chaotic like the older 3rd Party Development section did.
The older forum plugin/skin section will soon be closed for new posts and phased out over the next 4-6 weeks, so be sure to create a new entry for your existing apps and skins on the new Market section.
Check out the new Market development section here:
Centrafuse Market - Centrafuse Auto - Connected Car Apps User Community
For those of you ready to upload your apps now, give us a few days to put the finishing touches on the app submission page. We should be finishing this in the next week or so. We'll announce in the new Market section's announcement sub-forum when this is ready to go. In the meantime
check out the SDK docs and learn what you need to prepare your app for submission to the paid Market.
Thanks everyone,
Reagan and the Centrafuse Team
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